Piano Trio

Note

I’ve wanted to write a piano trio for some time—it strikes me as one of the most mutable of the standard chamber music combi­na­tions, some­where between the elegant homo­gene­ity of a string quartet and the orches­tral grandios­ity of a piano quintet. The trio can actually do both things well, with a nimble­ness and trans­parency all its own.

My Piano Trio is three large struc­tures built with many similar repe­ti­tions of the same module. The result is piece so obsessed with its own material that it seemed to demand the generic title. In the first two move­ments, this obses­sion is inter­rog­a­tive, even aggres­sive; the struc­tures are stress tests, seeing how much layering, coun­ter­point, rhythmic and harmonic distor­tion the music can be subjected to until it reaches a breaking point. The final movement is a more passive sort of obses­sion, uncon­sciously turning over the same idea until it trans­forms itself unbidden.